Digitizing audio cassettes and extracting the contents of digital cartridges.

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Mon Sep 11 08:48:23 UTC 2017


Cables are standard. I don't recall what the female connector end is
called, but it's a standard USB extension cable type of connector, i.e.
you can plug one end of the cable into the other.

Perkins sells the cables on line, as ell as 4Gb NlS-style cartridges. I
believe LS&S and APH also sell them.

The cartridges need to be VFAT formatted.

hth

Janina


Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> Okay, I'v managed to find Perkins branded Digital Cartridges on
> Amazon, but there doesn't seem to be any listings for the cables. Does
> anyone know if the cartridges include the cables? Either way, I'm
> tempted to pick up a 16GB cartridge as a stop gap for playing the
> encrypted files if I can't figure out how to play them on my Blaze ET
> or Linux PC, though considering how anemic 16GB is for storage this
> day and age, I find myself wondering if my digital cartridge player
> can play audiobooks stored on an SD card in a dongle-style reader
> connected to the USB port on the side of the player. *Tries it with
> the 256GB card from my Blaze ET.* Okay, its been beeping for a few
> minutes and the pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons just play a
> please wait message with no explanation. I can only assume its trying
> to scan the SD card for compatible files.
> 
> Given a suggestion to use a standard tape deck to rip two of a
> cassette's four tracks at a time and do post processing to account for
> tapes having non-standard formats, I've been searching for a suitable
> one on Amazon, and while there are several rather affordable models
> designed specifically for converting cassettes to digital files, it
> isn't always clear which models are stand-alone, which rely on a PC
> and specific drivers, and which should work with any recording device
> with a line-in/microphone jack, and many sound like they're hardcoded
> to output mp3, which I deem completely unacceptable in this age of
> terabyte harddrives and 256GB memory cards, and even cutting record
> time by more than half isn't worth lossy compression when I already
> have a recording device with line-in and wav support, and there's no
> mention of sample rate or bit depth on any of the product pages I've
> checked. If anyone has any suggestions for cutting through the cruft,
> it would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> I've only ever used sox for concatenating flac files, but I understand
> its one of the most versatile command line tools for manipulating
> streamed audio. Can anyone provide instructions on how to do the
> following tasks in sox or via another command line tool?
> 
> -Reversing an audio stream in a way equivalent to playing an audio
> cassette backwards.
> -Altering the sample rate for playback without altering the samples
> themselves. Also, am I correct that, if your analog source is playing
> at double speed, you'd want to record at twice the target sample rate
> before slowing the recording down?
> -Splitting multi-channel files into single channels files or merging
> single-channel files into multi-channel files.
> -Trimming silence to a given length at the biginning/end of a stream
> or splitting a stream into multiple files in the middle of internal
> silence exceeding a certain length.
> -Anything else that might be useful for the task at hand.
> 
> Oh, and my digital cartridge player eventually finished whatever it
> was doing, but still offered no explanation, not even a "no content
> found" message. The contents of my SD card seems unaffected putting it
> back in my Blaze ET.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Jeffery Wright
> President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
> Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa




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